I had a chance to play engineer for 4 hours on one of the last stress tests. It seems like with their second healing ability swap, the med kit, they could be the closest thing to a true healer. It was worthless on the story arc mission because the NPCs would not use them. It would be really enjoyable to use with other players. I could not level fast enough to unlock flamethrower > <. I could see really enjoying this class.

It also looks like they cut teh bomb radius in half. Thats a kick in the teeth, goodluck actually hitting anyone with that. And once again, a kit needs massive traiting to be remotely usefull.

Did that change take place before or after the last stress test? I mean, are there some people that tried the bomb kit with the reduced radius in pvp to see if their bombing strategies were too hard with it?

Did that change take place before or after the last stress test? I mean, are there some people that tried the bomb kit with the reduced radius in pvp to see if their bombing strategies were too hard with it?

When I was playing my grenadier / explosions aoe build, I did not notice any nerf to the bomb radius. I tried it both with and without the increased radius traits - smoke bombs had the same radius as freakin' meteor storm (traited).

Edit: And this was the current, most recent build available for testing.

Did that change take place before or after the last stress test? I mean, are there some people that tried the bomb kit with the reduced radius in pvp to see if their bombing strategies were too hard with it?

It was a tooltip correction, range hasnt actually changed as far as i could find out.

Just noticed today that grenades are target bound underwater, like a homing missile. They're incredibly fun to use in the new battleground.

The tool kit also seemed to be much stronger. I was getting constant 2k crits on the normal attack, with 4k at the end of the chain with a power build. The push back is also a 4k crit and coupled with throw wrench (2k crits x2) and the lightning discharges from the toolbelt trait, it's great burst.

There is also a pesky problem with the medikit. If you press the button that activates it, it appears. If you press it again, you don't get your normal weapon again as with the other kits. You need to press the weapon changing button to get back your weapon skills. That wasn't the case in the stress tests. I hope it's a bug and they'll fix it

I'm having a great time playing engineer at the moment. Without any gap closers or ranged CC NPCs will never have a chance at catching me with all my nifty utility. I'm having a good time playing glass cannon against melee in PvE and PvP, though Im still only level 25 and have yet to experience much of the world.

Another thing i found out, and this is perhaps the worst one yet. Whenever you equip a Kit you effectively unequip your real weapon, and you lose all the stats you gained from that weapon.

So any stat on your equiped weapon(s) are gone while you use a kit. Power, condition damage, vitality, toughness whatever. You drop down in stats.
I found this out when i wanted to get a more durable build and i used a Rifle with high toughness and vitality, but when i switched to my Elixirgun i noticed the health i previously gained was once again gone. Didnt take much testing to see this applied to all stats. So much for getting some extra survability.

This only further pushes kits into just something you quickly switch to for a specific ability (CC, boon, condition w/e) and then back to the REAL weapon. Of which you only have two...

Regarding the engineering trait "tools", is the tool belt you have as an engineer the abilities with the default keybinds f1,f2, f3 and f4?

Yup. 10chars

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Another thing i found out, and this is perhaps the worst one yet. Whenever you equip a Kit you effectively unequip your real weapon, and you lose all the stats you gained from that weapon.

So any stat on your equiped weapon(s) are gone while you use a kit. Power, condition damage, vitality, toughness whatever. You drop down in stats.
I found this out when i wanted to get a more durable build and i used a Rifle with high toughness and vitality, but when i switched to my Elixirgun i noticed the health i previously gained was once again gone. Didnt take much testing to see this applied to all stats. So much for getting some extra survability.

This only further pushes kits into just something you quickly switch to for a specific ability (CC, boon, condition w/e) and then back to the REAL weapon. Of which you only have two...

I can't for the life of me remember where, but I'm almost positive I've seen ANet state that that is unintentional and shall be fixed in the foreseeable future.

I am having lots of problem understanding the DPS Engineer seeing how both Pistol and Rifle burst are up close. The issue is using those 'burst' abilities in WvW pretty much kills me in most cases. That leaves me using kits like Grenade or Elixir which is great and really fun but I really want to use rifle or pistol.

With Rifle I am able to kite 1 target for ever as I have trated cripple on immobilize and use immobilize belt + rifle. But in WvW its pretty meaningless!

I may be wrong but it seems even though one could sit back and play rifle/pistol this profession is designed to to use kits or belts -grenades, flame thrower, elixir, mines and so on.